Make up your mind and say yes
September 28, 2008
I’ve been having second thoughts about the project I proposed.
Make up your mind and say yes
I’ve been having second thoughts about the project I proposed. I want to ensure that it is doable in three months, turns out to be interesting enough to make a presentation on and also helps my own research along.
The best thing seems to be what I’ve already proposed. That’s directly what I need to do now, and I told my research lab (Social Learning Software Laboratory) that exploring the literature of open source would be my goal for this semester: Review open source literature, find out what’s been done generally, and specifically in the arena of analyzing public artifacts, and also of power networks..
So I’ve said in my proposal that I was going to do the narrative of my process. Is that going to be interesting enough to the class? How can I make the process of me slowly closing in on a review paper of “Digital archaeology of social spaces: revealing social structure of open source software communites through examination of public artifacts” be made interesting, especially to people who may not have heard IS research presented before?
Or, I need to understand the literature on power networks and power. So I could do that, too, but that doesn’t help me directly. That could also be one of those things for which I just take what someone else has done and run with it.
Or, I can continue along the path I had been following until recently, and in which I’ve found the majority of the literature and even read half of it: visualizations of e-mail archives. I would like at some point soon to write a review of this literature, and it’s still very valuable to me, since that’s the kind of software that I would like to write.
